This movie is apparently very bad. Hollywood has forgotten how to write and Lucasfilm is lobotomized by San Francisco culture. As described, The Mandalorian and Grogu sounds like a blockbuster bomb scripted by a Star Wars fan fiction writer hired from a Tumblr resume. Critical Drinker calls it a “damp squib”. Structure, plot, and basic writing problems abound because the film was made with a scrapbook instead of a script.
It’s not just people with bad politics saying the film is bad. IndieWire says that “Jon Favreau’s film feels like three good-enough TV episodes smushed together” to create “Star Wars at its most generic”. Vulture deplores the “lifeless performances that seem determined to lull us to sleep”, saying the film “probably shouldn’t have been a movie”. The Hollywood Reporter, which exists to glaze the industry, calls it “just good enough to make you wish it were better”. “One of the most empty and hollow” of the franchise, “forgettable and inconsequential … rudimentary, forgettable, and frustrating”, Collider says. These are normally the outlets that would defend it and denounce the haters.
Only small children will be entertained, Chris Gore said in a preview video this week. Box office tracking began to dip as the audience checked out. The Mandalorian and Grogu is likely going to underperform and bomb. Disney has wrecked the biggest single Lucasfilm brand beyond repair. Every creative, including Favreau, has been ruined by the praxis of woke Hollywood, or as I call it, Hollyweird. The Kathleen Kennedy era has been an epic disaster of feminized boy branding. She is gone, now, but the damage lingers on.
Pedro Pascal gives a voice performance for all but a few minutes in the film because his character has a religious devotion to his face-concealing helmet. Pascal’s wooden monotone is noted by many reviewers, especially women. “The Mandalorian was really the thing that sort of made him this pseudo-superstar in Hollywood,” JesterBell says. Pascal’s character experienced no character development, she says. JesterBell was unable to follow the story. Even the opening crawl confused more than it enlightened. She was bored. In another recent video, this YouTube critic accidentally called the movie “Mandalorian and Grok” because she was tired from seeing it.
We are all so tired of Disney Star Wars. It isn’t Star Wars. Sitting through Mandalorian and Grogu made JesterBell hate being a movie reviewer. She is however one of the ‘influencers’ on YouTube who have rubbished so many Star Wars products in the Kennedy era of Lucasfilm, earning the enmity of mainstream media ‘journalists’ (read: influencers) as a class. This is in fact a classic conflict of old guard and new guard that plays out on YouTube in the form of algorithms and access.
But there is a limit to what money can do, and Lucasfilm is actively trying to conceal just how much money was spent on this film. Given the marketing spend will be about the same as the film budget, and the fact that half of every ticket goes to the theater, it is increasingly unlikely that The Mandalorian and Grogu will come close to breaking even. We have good reason to expect that the real production costs will be much higher. Disney went all-in on this bad bet.
Pedro Pascal was never cut out to be a great leading man to begin with. He was however a perfect non-Anglo, non-toxic male to play the male leads at a time when studios were churning out content to own the chuds. After the Harvey Weinstein trial, Hollyweird gave us an era of feminized males and impotent, ‘non-toxic’ fathers. Struggle within feminized cultural institutions produced scrapbook films that satisfy committees of people with a view from nowhere instead of audiences.
Women do not turn out in droves to see feminized boy brands. Men o to see boy brands and take the women and children in their lives. This is the formula that made Star Wars work until Kennedy broke it. Lucasfilm lost that magic the instant the force became female. It just took this long for the damage to be revealed.
Pascal was typecast in the new Hollyweird ‘father’ roles, which explains his overexposure. The Mandalorian character gives women leadership. In this film, he lets a green baby lead and takes orders from Sigourney Weaver. Almost exactly one year ago, the same YouTube influencers I follow today were predicting that his star would set with this movie. We have all had enough of Pedro Pascal, please, we do not want any more of this actor playing emasculated roles.